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How many people use the typesetting language LaTeX? This is obviously a hard question. However, another way to look at it is to calculate the percentage of published scholarly articles written in LaTeX.

To begin, let's take a look at penetration and adoption of LaTeX across various disciplines, as shown in the Table below, extracted from a paper called "Don't format Manuscripts" Brischoux 2009. The results are not surprising here- LaTeX use is limited to the hard sciences, and especially: Mathematics and Stats, and then Physics and Computer Science.

I’m surprised by the LaTeX rate for Astronomy & Astrophysics. The main journals (A&A, ApJ, MNRAS) encourage authors to format their manuscript with LaTeX, so I would have thought that the LaTeX rate would be higher than that. Brichoux & Leganeux (2009) say that they selected journal randomly, so there might be a bias here: these journals are not necessarily the major ones.

I'm surprised by the LaTeX rate for Astronomy & Astrophysics. The main journals (A&A, ApJ, MNRAS) encourage authors to format their manuscript with LaTeX, so I would have thought that the LaTeX rate would be higher than that. Brichoux & Leganeux (2009) say that they selected journal randomly, so there might be a bias here: these journals are not necessarily the major ones.

Hi Sébastien, there are entire subfields of astronomy (planetary science, notably, but also astrobiology, I think) who do not use LaTeX. The number may indeed be lower than it really is, BUT it is certainly not 100% (closer to 75% IMO)

Hi Sébastien, there are entire subfields of astronomy (planetary science, notably, but also astrobiology, I think) who do not use LaTeX. The number may indeed be lower than it really is, BUT it is certainly not 100\% (closer to 75\% IMO)

Question from library land...if the paper was prepared in LaTeX, but submitted as PDF, are you counting as LaTeX? We've been measuring how theses are created at Caltech and find more LaTeX use in the workflow but not submission...

Question from library land...if the paper was prepared in LaTeX, but submitted as PDF, are you counting as LaTeX? We've been measuring how theses are created at Caltech and find more LaTeX use in the workflow but not submission...

Then, let's look at the total number of scholarly papers published. Scopus lists 2,253,230 citable documents published in 2014, of which 151,085 in Mathematics, 274,287 in Physics and Astronomy, and 255,916 in Computer Science (calculated using the compare tool on Scopus/SciMago).

Assuming that a portion of these hard science papers were written in LaTeX (using the percentages of LaTeX penetration from Table 1) we find that in 2014: 418,732 out of 2,253,230 articles (18%) were written using LaTeX.

The number of LaTeX articles was calculated as follows:

Mathematics and Statistics: 151,085 (92% LaTeX = 138,998)

Physics and Astronomy: 274,287 (60% LaTeX = 164,572)

Computer Science: 255,916 (45% LaTeX = 115,162)

What do you think? Do you have other ideas on how to estimate how many people use LaTeX? Let me know by commenting on this post.